One of the biometric industry’s most exciting projects – the roll out of biometric-based smart ID cards in Indonesia – is making stunning progress, spurred on by the success of India’s UID programme. In what is believed to be an industry record the team has achieved 100 million biometric enrolments and de-duplications in just under one year.

Dr Gamawan Fauzi, the Minister of Home Affairs, has publically stated that he will resign if the project does not meet its goals by the end of 2012.

Dr Husni Fahmi, Chief of Sub-directorate, Population Administration in Indonesia, told delegates at the Biometric Consortium conference, that the mission is to register and de-dupe 172 million citizen records, and distribute highly-secure cards in just two years – ready for national elections taking place in April 2014. (The data collection from potential voters must be complete by December 2012 to comply with legislation.)

Fahmi said that 80% of the population has already been enrolled (140 million residents across Indonesia). Enrolment comprises taking a photo, digital signature, ten fingerprints and both iris images, alongside biographical information.

So far, 119 million records have been deduplicated and a staggering 60 million ID cards have been printed. Each card stores the two best verifiable ISO fingerprint templates, and photo alongside other information.

The deduplication effort takes advantage of all three biometrics in a iris/fingerprint/face multimodal process, with iris recognition, particularly, enabling this process to be faster and more accurate. The target is for a FPIR <0.01 and FNIR <3%. At its peak there are some one million de-dupes per day. Most duplications came in the form of designer contact lenses, a very low number of these being genuine imposter attempts, Fahmi told Planet Biometrics.

Getting the biometric data to the data centre has been no mean feat. The government trained over 72K operators in 497 regionals (counties) – spread across 17,000 plus islands. Each enrolment location supported two stations and often opened at 5am in the morning and closed at 2am the next morning, working over two or three shifts.

Each location is averaging 550 enrolments per day, meaning some 600,000 enrolments per day across Indonesia.

The bidding process for the contract took 4.5 months, with a contract being signed with the PNRI Consortium on 1 July 2011. The biometric search engine and biometric capture devices were supplied by L1 (MorphoTrust), systems integration is performed by Biomorf Lone Indonesia. All IT hardware was supplied by HP.

Prior to the current project, the country made strenuous efforts to ensure its existing identity numbers (NIK) database was up to date and accurate. This enabled there to be a unique ID number per person, smoothing the way for successful implementation of the e-KTP ID cards.